The Camargue is the delta of the Rhône in southern France, a flat triangle of more than 930 km² south of Arles, enclosed by the river’s two arms, the Grand Rhône to the east and the Petit Rhône to the west, and by the Mediterranean coast. Most of it lies in the Bouches-du-Rhône department, with the Petite Camargue extending west into Gard. It is a landscape of shallow brine lagoons (étangs) cut off from the sea by sandbars, reed marshes, salt pans and rice fields, and about a third of it is lake or marsh. The Camargue became a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance on 1 December 1986, its central lagoons have been a nature reserve since 1927, the Parc naturel régional de Camargue was created in 1970, and UNESCO has recognised it as a biosphere reserve since 1977. More than 400 bird species have been recorded here, and three animals define it above all: the greater flamingo, the white Camargue horse and the black Camargue bull.
Greater Flamingos of the Étang du Fangassier
No animal is more closely tied to the Camargue than the greater flamingo. The delta’s brine lagoons are one of the few European habitats for the species, and in summer up to 30,000 flamingos gather here. Their nesting site is an islet built specially for them in the Étang du Fangassier, one of the lagoons included in the original 1927 reserve.
The colony’s numbers have been followed closely for decades, and they show a striking recovery. Between 1947 and 1960 the Camargue never held more than 4,000 breeding pairs. From the early 1990s the count has regularly topped 10,000 pairs, though it swings sharply from year to year: about 11,000 pairs bred in 1999 and 22,200 the following year.
Much of that recovery is credited to one estate. In 1947 the Swiss ornithologist Luc Hoffmann bought the Tour du Valat property near the hamlet of Le Sambuc, and in 1954 he turned it into a biological research station; the continued presence of greater flamingos in France has been attributed to the conservation work done there. Hoffmann went on to co-found WWF and helped establish the Ramsar Convention itself. Today the Tour du Valat covers about 2,600 hectares, 1,844 of them classified as a regional nature reserve in 2008.
Studies of the birds also show how mobile they are. Most Camargue flamingos moult their flight feathers one at a time so they can keep flying, and while only a small number cross the Mediterranean each year, birds move between colonies: Fuente de Piedra in southern Spain lets flamingos start breeding earlier, but after a dry winter it is poor for raising young, and some birds then leave it for the Camargue.
Étang de Vaccarès: Ducks, Reed Marshes and the 13,232-Hectare Reserve
At the heart of the delta lies the Étang de Vaccarès, the largest and northernmost of the Camargue’s lagoons. It covers about 65 km², or 6,500 hectares, yet is nowhere deeper than about 2 metres. It is also the central reservoir of the delta’s plumbing: water levels across the Camargue are run through a network of pumping, irrigation and drainage stations, and the Vaccarès is the main element of that system.
The lagoon was the first place in the Camargue to be protected. In 1927 the Société nationale d’acclimatation, now the Société nationale de protection de la nature, created a zoological and botanical reserve around it, at a time when salt producers and farmers both had designs on the land. Gabriel Tallon became its first director in 1935 and held the post for forty years. On 24 April 1975 it became the Réserve naturelle nationale de Camargue, which today covers 13,232 hectares of the Vaccarès and the lower lagoons between it and the sea, making it one of the largest nature reserves in Europe.
The reserve’s value is as a stopover and wintering ground. Around 150,000 ducks and other waterbirds pass through the Camargue on migration each year, and large numbers of ducks spend the winter on the Vaccarès. To the north, the reed beds of three big marshes, Julian-Bernacle-Saliers, Pont de Rousty and Grand Mar-Bruns-Sigoulette, are breeding grounds for many species, and the reserve has recorded 283 bird species, with flamingo numbers peaking at about 34,000 at the end of summer. BirdLife International lists the Camargue as an Important Bird Area. The protection is not complete: runoff from farmland and nearby industrial zones reaches the lagoon, and studies have found significant contamination in its fish.
White Horses and Black Bulls of the Manades
The Camargue’s best-known mammals are domestic, but they live much as wild animals do. The Camargue horse is a small, hardy breed that has lived in the marshes of the Rhône delta for centuries, possibly thousands of years; its exact origins are unknown. The horses are raised in semi-feral herds and rounded up once a year for health checks and branding. A breeders’ association was founded in 1964, the French government set breed standards in 1976, and a stud book followed in 1978. To be registered, a foal must be born outdoors and seen suckling from a registered mare. How many there are depends on whom you ask: a 2018 report to the FAO’s DAD-IS database gave a population of just over 14,500 in France, while the national stud service, Haras Nationaux, reported only 200 active stallions and 929 mares covered that year.
The horses are the mounts of the gardians, the Camargue herdsmen, who use them to manage the black cattle of the manades, the free-ranging herds. Two cattle breeds are raised this way. The Raço di Biòu, uniformly black with large horns that are grey at the base, cream in the middle and dark at the tips, is bred for the course camarguaise, a bloodless contest in which raseteurs try to snatch a cockade from the bull’s forehead. The other is the Brava, a fighting breed, and Camargue fighting bulls are raised both for local use and for export to Spain. Since 1996, beef from both has carried the protected designation “Taureau de Camargue”, and in the same year the native breed took its Provençal name. Its numbers have climbed fast, from about 5,950 animals in 2004 to over 20,000 by 2020.
The herding culture is old and organised. The Antique Confrérie des gardians de Saint-Georges, founded in 1512, still holds its festival in Arles every 1 May, and the Nacioun gardiano was set up in 1909 to defend Camargue traditions and the Provençal language. Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, on the coast about 1 km east of the mouth of the Petit Rhône, is often called the capital of the Camargue, and its commune, which takes in the Étang de Vaccarès, covers 37,461 hectares, the third-largest in metropolitan France after neighbouring Arles and Val-Cenis in Savoie.
Salin-de-Giraud: Glasswort, Sea Lavender and Salt
The southeastern corner of the delta is shaped by salt, and its plants and birds are those that can tolerate it. In the saline marshes known locally as sansouïres, glasswort and sea lavender grow alongside tamarisk and reeds, plants adapted to the saline ground. Salt has been taken from this coast since prehistoric times. In the Middle Ages it made the fortunes of the Cistercian “salt abbeys” of Ulmet, Franquevaux and Psalmody.
Industrial production began in the 19th century, when the chemical companies Pechiney and Solvay founded the village of Salin-de-Giraud, established in 1856 on the right bank of the Grand Rhône about 40 km from the centre of Arles. The salt works there, and those at Aigues-Mortes on the western edge of the Petite Camargue, are still in operation, their brine pools often tinted a vivid pink.
Nearby, at the junction of the delta and the stony Crau plain, the Marais du Vigueirat reserve protects about 1,200 hectares that are home to more than 2,000 animal and plant species.
Rice Fields, 40 Mosquito Species and 40,000 Lost Hectares
The northern Camargue looks very different: a freshwater, river-and-lake landscape irrigated for farming. Rice became a major crop in the years after the Second World War, when large areas of salt marsh were desalinated, and white rice production peaked in the 1960s. By the 1980s, cultivated rice had crossed with the red wild rice of the marshes to produce the delta’s own Camargue red rice.
The same fresh water that grows rice supports the Camargue’s least loved inhabitants: the delta is known for its mosquitoes, of which 40 species have been counted. More seriously for wildlife, farming, industry and urban growth took a heavy toll in the 20th century. Between 1944 and 1988 the delta lost about 40,000 hectares of natural habitat, and much of the outer Camargue has been drained.
The land is also still moving. The Rhône carries up to 20 million cubic metres of sediment a year, and some lagoons are remnants of its old channels. Aigues-Mortes, built in the Middle Ages as a coastal port, now stands some 5 km inland. Landowners from Arles had the Rhône diked against floods at the end of the 18th century, and the digue à la mer, the sea dyke built in 1858, gave temporary protection against coastal erosion. Today dams upstream on the Rhône and sea defences have slowed the delta’s growth, and parts of the beach near Salin-de-Giraud and Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer are retreating.
The Camargue does not face these pressures alone. The Danube Delta, listed as a Ramsar wetland in 1991, lost large areas to drainage after 1960 in much the same way, and the Camargue’s regional park is twinned with Spain’s Doñana, with which it shares many ecological, anthropological and ethnographic traits. To follow the water that built it back to its glacier in the Swiss Alps, read our Rhône River guide.